-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- The John F. Kennedy who was elected in 1960 was not going to change the world . His major charge against the Eisenhower administration was that it was not prosecuting the Cold War vigorously .

He believed that its policy of Massive Retaliation in the event of any attack meant America would be incapable of a flexible response to a non-nuclear communist aggression in the Third World , where , he believed , the Cold War would be won or lost .

He aimed to close any missile gap -LRB- actually non-existent -RRB- with the Soviets . He aimed to beat the Russians to the moon . He planned to calm business fears by appointing a Republican Secretary of the Treasury .

He wanted to avoid coercive civil rights legislation or the use of federal troops to enforce segregation because he put his faith in white southern moderate leaders .

The John F. Kennedy who was assassinated in 1963 had begun to change the world . Admittedly , the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion did not lessen the enthusiasm of either the president or his brother , Bobby , for covert action and counter-insurgency .

The military advisers committed to Vietnam were part of a flexible response -- but so was the inspirational Peace Corps .

But chastened by confronting the Russians over Berlin and missiles in Cuba , and reassured by the knowledge that the missile build-up had guaranteed a measure of Cold War stability , Kennedy moved to lessen Cold War tensions and the dangers of nuclear war .

He started a backchannel correspondence with Khrushchev . He negotiated , in the face of military opposition , a Test Ban Treaty which aimed to eliminate nuclear tests in the atmosphere . He was the first American president in the Cold War to talk about the Soviet Union as an adversary with whom the United States should peacefully compete , rather than an enemy to be defeated militarily .

Except in the Yom Kippur war in 1973 the world never again came close to a nuclear holocaust . Under JFK the first steps to dÃ © tente were taken . Kennedy was the first president to understand the Sino-Soviet split .

At home , he proposed a tax cut , not as a result of a budget surplus , but despite a budget deficit , in order to stimulate the economy . As a result of the crisis created by violent resistance in the South to civil rights protest , the president was forced to do the two things he did not want to do .

He sent in federal troops to force the admission of a black student to the University of Mississippi . After the Birmingham demonstrations and the defiance of Governor Wallace on the steps of the University of Alabama , he went on national television to promise strong civil rights legislation and acknowledged for the first time that civil rights was an inescapable moral issue .

Kennedy 's assassination and Johnson 's masterly leadership guaranteed the eventual passage of the civil rights bill and the tax cut . It did not interrupt the progress towards dÃ © tente .

But Kennedy 's death did put an end to third-party efforts to normalize relations with Cuba . Kennedy might have gone on to re-orient policy towards China . Would he have avoided the Vietnam disaster ?

Kennedy 's defenders argue passionately that , protected by a big re-election win in 1964 , he would have withdrawn American troops from Vietnam . But his Vietnam policy in late 1963 in which he acquiesced in the overthrow of President Diem 's government was already locked in a policy of sustaining a South Vietnam government that was ready to fight the communists .

He had effectively narrowed the options available to his successor . There is little evidence that he would have sanctioned the `` loss '' of South Vietnam .

Faced with the impossibility of finding a government that was both popular and willing to fight the Vietcong , how would Kennedy have avoided the commitment of ground troops in 1965 ?

Advised by McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara , who guided Vietnam policy under both JFK and LBJ , would Kennedy have been prepared to scale down the American commitment and see the South Vietnam regime collapse ?

British Ambassador and friend of the Kennedys , David Ormsby-Gore , tried to console Jackie Kennedy by telling her that the late president , `` had great things to do and would have done them . ''

The jury may be out on that judgment . But the British reacted with the same grief as the Americans to a lifer cut short , to the cruel death of a young man whose vigor and youth contrasted so markedly with the contemporary political leaders of an older generation : De Gaulle , Adenauer and Macmillan .

They established at Runnymede , the site of the signing of Magna Carta , a memorial funded by popular appeal and driven by cross-party consensus on an acre of land permanently ceded to the United States .

David Ormsby-Gore , as Lord Harlech , was the first chair of the Kennedy Memorial Trust which also awarded scholarships to the `` best and the brightest '' of British students to do graduate work at Harvard and MIT .

On Friday , as current chair of the Trust , I will be laying a wreath at the memorial . Why does JFK 's memory still resonate ? Perhaps it is because contemporary American politics is dysfunctional and anti-intellectual fundamentalism is so rampant in American public life .

Kennedy was familiar enough with congressional gridlock and only too aware of the paranoid style of American politics on the extreme right . But he was the modern American president who was most comfortable in his own skin , who surrounded himself with intellectuals and delighted in their company , and who made government service an honorable calling after the ravages of McCarthyism .

Kennedy may not have changed the world and his assassination may not have significantly altered America 's future , but 50 years on it is not surprising that his memory still evokes a profound sense of loss .

PHOTOS : JFK 's alleged affairs

The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Tony Badger .

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Badger argues it is not surprising that JFK 's memory still evokes a sense of loss

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It still resonate because contemporary American politics is dysfunctional , he says

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JFK surrounded himself with intellectuals , made government service an honorable calling